Editor’s Introduction

With this issue, World Watch marks the end of its
20th volume and year of publication. The magazine
was launched with the January/February issue
in 1988, when the Worldwatch Institute was
already 14 years old, and has published six issues
every year since then (and will continue to do so
for the foreseeable future). That amounts to 120 issues, several
hundred articles, and, by a back-of-the-envelope calculation,
over 3 million words—and counting.

Have the sacrifice of trees and the expenditure of hundreds
of thousands of dollars on materials, supplies, research, editing,
art, design, printing, and mailing been worth it? Have
we made any difference?

Tough questions. As the following essays attest, many of
the issues that were important 20 years ago are still (or again)
prominent on the radar. We’re still trying to persuade the
world to act on climate change, pick renewables rather than
nuclear power, stop clearcutting tropical forests and wiping out
species, and so on.

While I doubt that we could point to a specific, worldchanging
policy triumph traceable to the appearance of an
article in these pages, only in our fantasies can most of us
claim such unequivocal success. Progress in social and environmental
change is generally measured in smaller increments.
Society is more like an ocean current than a vehicle; it’s massive,
highly inertial, vaguely delimited, and slow-moving, and
shifting it peacefully in a new direction usually requires years
of sustained effort.We’ve played a role in fueling that effort by
helping to supply the information and analysis that should be
prerequisites to thoughtful action. And by that measure, I
think World Watch can hold up its head.

Over the years we’ve covered the environmental waterfront, showcased the work
of some of the best writers, activists, and scientists of the day, broken some key stories, and won some awards. Among the more recognizable
writers whose work has appeared here are Ed Ayres, Robert U.
Ayres, Wendell Berry, Lester Brown, Mac Chapin, Andrei
Codrescu,Herman Daly,Anne and Paul Ehrlich,Mikhail Gorbachev,
Nadine Gordimer, James Hansen, Hal Kane, Frances
Moore Lappé, Amory Lovins, Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley
Robinson,Arundhati Roy,Vandana Shiva,Vaclav Smil, James
Gustave Speth, Mike Tidwell, Edward C. Wolf, and George
Woodwell—not to mention the dozens of gifted and impassioned
people who are still with Worldwatch or have passed
through on their way to distinguished careers in related fields.

The retrospective essays that follow are written by three
longtime veterans of Worldwatch Institute and six former
staffers who have moved on. All were on the staff of the Institute
in 1988 and contributed articles to World Watch that year.
We’ve asked them to touch on some topic they wrote about two
decades ago and consider what has happened in the intervening
years. As noted,many of the topics will seem familiar—perhaps
depressingly so. But in all cases, it seems fair to say that
things have indeed shifted in significant ways, often for the better.
We’ll take a small share of the credit for that, and we expect
to keep watching, informing, urging, provoking, and, I hope,
inspiring anyone who will listen until it’s no longer necessary.

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With this issue, World Watch marks the end of its
20th volume and year of publication.